PAUL MILLER -- TO BE OR NOT TO BE -- BACK IN INTERNET AFTER A YEAR. --GENERAL AWARENESS

One year ago I left the
internet. I thought it was making me unproductive. I thought it lacked
meaning. I thought it was "corrupting my soul."

It's a been a year now
since I "surfed the web" or "checked my email" or "liked" anything with a
figurative rather than literal thumbs up. I've managed to stay
disconnected, just like I planned. I'm internet free.

And now I'm supposed to
tell you how it solved all my problems. I'm supposed to be enlightened.
I'm supposed to be more "real," now. More perfect.

But instead it's 8PM
and I just woke up. I slept all day, woke with eight voicemails on my
phone from friends and coworkers. I went to my coffee shop to consume
dinner, the Knicks game, my two newspapers, and a copy of The New Yorker. And now I'm watching Toy Story
while I glance occasionally at the blinking cursor in this text
document, willing it to write itself, willing it to generate the
epiphanies my life has failed to produce.

I didn't want to meet this Paul at the tail end of my yearlong journey.

n early 2012 I was 26 years
old and burnt out. I wanted a break from modern life — the hamster wheel
of an email inbox, the constant flood of WWW information which drowned
out my sanity. I wanted to escape.

I thought the internet might
be an unnatural state for us humans, or at least for me. Maybe I was too
ADD to handle it, or too impulsive to restrain my usage. I'd used the
internet constantly since I was twelve, and as my livelihood since I was
fourteen. I'd gone from paperboy, to web designer, to technology writer
in under a decade. I didn't know myself apart from a sense of
ubiquitous connection and endless information. I wondered what else
there was to life. "Real life," perhaps, was waiting for me on the other
side of the web browser.

My plan was to quit my job,
move home with my parents, read books, write books, and wallow in my
spare time. In one glorious gesture I'd outdo all quarter-life crises to
come before me. I'd find the real Paul, far away from all the noise,
and become a better me.

My goal would be to discover what the internet had done to me over the years

But for some reason, The Verge wanted to pay
me to leave the internet. I could stay in New York and share my
findings with the world, beam missives about my internet-free life to
the citizens of the internet I'd left behind, sprinkle wisdom on them
from my high tower.